1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communications, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for transmitting uplink control information in a wireless communication system supporting multiple carriers.
2. Related Art
In order to maximize efficiency of limited radio resources, an effective transmission and reception scheme and methods of utilization thereof have been proposed in a broadband wireless communication system. An orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system capable of reducing inter-symbol interference (ISI) with a low complexity is taken into consideration as one of next generation wireless communication systems. In the OFDM, a serially input data symbol is converted into N parallel data symbols, and is then transmitted by being carried on each of separated N subcarriers. The subcarriers maintain orthogonality in a frequency dimension. Each orthogonal channel experiences mutually independent frequency selective fading. As a result, complexity is decreased in a receiving end and an interval of a transmitted symbol is increased, thereby minimizing the ISI.
In a system using the OFDM as a modulation scheme, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is a multiple access scheme in which multiple access is achieved by independently providing a part of available subcarrier to each user. In the OFDMA, frequency resources (i.e., subcarriers) are provided to respective users, and the respective frequency resources do not overlap with one another in general since they are independently provided to the multiple users. Consequently, the frequency resources are allocated to the respective users in a mutually exclusive manner. In an OFDMA system, frequency diversity for the multiple users can be obtained by using frequency selective scheduling, and subcarriers can be allocated variously according to a permutation rule for the subcarriers. In addition, a spatial multiplexing scheme using multiple antennas can be used to increase efficiency of a spatial domain.
A carrier aggregation system has recently drawn attention. The carrier aggregation system implies a system that configures a broadband by aggregating one or more carriers having a bandwidth smaller than that of a target broadband when the wireless communication system intends to support the broadband.
Meanwhile, uplink control information (UCI) can be transmitted through an uplink control channel, i.e., a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH). The UCI can include various types of information such as a scheduling request (SR), acknowledgement/non-acknowledgement (ACK/NACK) information for hybrid ARQ (HARQ), a channel quality indicator (CQI), a precoding matrix indicator (PMI), a rank indicator (RI), etc. The PUCCH carries various types of control information according to a format.
An amount of UCI required in the carrier aggregation system is increased in comparison with a single carrier system supporting only one carrier. Therefore, there is a need for a method for effectively transmitting various types of UCI in the carrier aggregation system.